African American baseball players who came up in the 1950s and 1960s often discuss their experiences playing minor league ball in the Deep South during this period.  This was an especially combustible time, with the Civil Rights Movement beginning to accelerate and the situation becoming more violent by the day.  Especially vulnerable were black ballplayers, who were joining Major League Baseball in larger numbers in the wake of Jackie’s Robinson’s integration of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.  Minor leaguers always have a tougher lot than those who make it to The Show, but to be playing in front of a segregated crowd during the Civil Rights Era was often literally to put your life at risk.  Roy White went one further; he had to wear the Confederate flag on his uniform.

This is why we will always love baseball.

Over at Sports Guy Bill Simmons’s new website, Grantland, there is an oral history of the late, great National.  For those too young to remember, the National was a daily sports newspaper that lasted an all too brief year and a half in the early 1990s.  It would be difficult to explain to anyone under the age of thirty-five just what a national sports daily meant to us twenty years ago.  Today if I want to know how many home runs Don Mattingly hit in 1986 (31), I go online and find it in seconds.  It wasn’t always so.  In the years before the Web was part of our daily lives, there simply was no way to follow sports as much or well as we would have liked.  This was especially true where I grew up in South Florida, where so many of us came from elsewhere.  If you were a high school kid from, say, Cincinnati and wanted to follow the Reds you were pretty much out of luck.  Things got better a few years later when the USA Today came along.  McPaper was a considerable step up from the local rag with its one-paragraph recaps of last night’s games, but even it lacked the in-depth coverage we take for granted today.

Television was not much better.  Cable was still in its infancy in the 1980s and many of us, especially if we were latchkey kids from single-parent households, couldn’t afford it anyway.  MLB.TV was beyond imagination.  About all you could do was watch This Week in Baseball each Saturday afternoon and hope for that three minute interview with Barry Larkin, Chris Sabo, or the star of whatever team you happened to root for.

Enter the National.

Frank Deford’s paper gave you the box scores and so much more besides.  It was not just good sports writing, it was good writing period.  The National was very much in the spirit of the New Journalism of the 1950s and 1960s, when people like Gay Talese and Dick Schaap were writing “sports” articles as deep and thought-provoking as anything out there.  And it came out every day.  The only people who didn’t like the National were its accountants.  After hemorrhaging money for nearly eighteen months the paper finally went under on June 13, 1991.  In today’s digital world, such a newspaper is no longer necessary.  Still, it is something to look back at a moment in history when a newspaper mattered to us so much.

Baseball was still very much a developing sport when the war divided the nation. It was decidedly more popular in the Northern states, and many Southerners learned about the game watching Union soldiers play in Confederate POW camps. Soon both sides got into the game.

“It was played on both sides,” Fort Sumter historian Richard Hatcher said. “It wasn’t the game it is today in popularity, but it was one of many things soldiers did during long periods of inactivity.”

Enjoy your Sunday.

From the “Who knew?” department:

Shortly before his untimely death on Christmas day 1989, Billy Martin had met videographer Tom Molito to discuss making a video detailing Martin’s managerial strategies.

Billy was dressed in his usual cowboy outfit, which might have been incongruous for anyone at a business meeting in New York City, but for Billy, it seemed perfectly natural.

Tom and Billy agreed that the video would emphasize his New York Yankees years as well as the strike-shortened 1981 season when Martin led the Oakland A’s to a division title.

As Billy gulped his drink, the topic switched from managing baseball games to managing the Union Forces at Gettysburg. Billy really was a student of the Civil War and he became quite animated discussing the Confederacy’s tactical errors that cost them victory.

I remember seeing the advertisements for the Martin documentary mentioned in the article when I visited Yankee Stadium for the first time in 1990.  The Bronx was truly a zoo that season.  It was the year George Steinbrenner fired manager Bucky Dent, Commissioner Fay Vincent banned the Boss from day-to-day team operations for spying on Dave Winfield, and the Yanks finished with the worst record in the American League.  Good times.

Hey everybody, Opening Day was last Thursday but that seemed a little early for a baseball post so I waited until today.  I was in Green-Wood Cemetery this past weekend and came across a few very special figures from baseball history.

It is now recognized that Union General Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball.  This was total fabrication.  Indeed, he probably knew nothing about the game.  No one person invented baseball; it was inspired by cricket and rounders and evolved independently in different locations throughout the country in the decades before the Civil War.  Still, there is one person who probably did more to institutionalize the game than anyone else: Henry Chadwick.  Chadwick ironically enough was an Englishman, who came to the United States as a young man and settled in Brooklyn.  What is so interesting about Chadwick is that he encompassed both the rational and literary aspects of the game.  He was a numbers crunching statistician who also cared about the written word.  For starters he invented the box score and wrote the first hard cover monograph ever written about the National Pastime, The Game of Baseball, in 1868.  Base hit, left on base, and chin music are just a few of the terms this Englishman added to the American lexicon.

Chadwick and his wife rest here.

The baseballs are not put of the monument but were left by visitors.

I love the base paths around the headstone.  Chadwick died in 1908 and the monument was dedicated a year later.

The bases are made of granite.  The belt buckle is a great detail.

The precursor to the Brooklyn Dodgers started play as a minor league team in 1883, the same year the Great Bridge opened.  The team eventually joined the National League of course.  Charles Ebbets bought the team outright in 1902.  His team moved into Ebbets Field in 1913.  Ebbets was one of many ballparks built in the decade after the first World Series in 1903.  These include Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field (1909); Washington’s Griffith Stadium (1911); Fenway Park, Tiger Stadium, and Crosley Field (1912); and Wrigley Field (1914).  The Dodgers played in Ebbets Field through the 1957 season, after which they moved to Los Angeles.

The headstone is unassuming and lies on a hill surrounded by others.

I’m so glad baseball is back.  Enjoy your spring.

I’ve always gotten a thrill from stories of recently found Long Lost Items.  What I love is that by definition the discovery is unexpected.  Someone is cleaning out the attic and comes across the love letters grandfather wrote to grandma from France all those years ago during the Great War.  A guy goes to a garage sale and finds the long lost 78 recording of an old bluesman that musicologists thought no longer existed.  Each discovery adds to the mosaic of our historical and cultural memory and gives us a deeper understanding our history.  This week something extra special has surfaced: 3 ½ minutes of moving images of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.  And not just any moving images.  The high quality footage was taken less than two weeks after the 1927 World Series when the American League MVP (Gehrig) and Home Run Champ (Ruth) were on a barnstorming tour.  The 1927 Yankees are considered by many to be the greatest team in Major League history and both men were in their prime during this time.

It’s snowing in New York today, but the regular season is a mere eight days away!